


Natalia Alianovna, Early 1941

by sageness



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Marvel (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Podfic Available, Red Room, Russian Mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-09
Updated: 2013-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-28 23:14:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/998063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sageness/pseuds/sageness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When was she ever a child, except in her dreams?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Natalia Alianovna, Early 1941

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Amy for beta-reading.
> 
> Note: if you're sensitive to animal harm, there is a brief moment of wild animal predation.
> 
> NOW WITH PODFIC! The lovely [kalakirya](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kalakirya/pseuds/kalakirya) has made an awesome podfic of this story! [You can download or stream it here!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2621876) \o/

  
  
  
  


"My origins are not in childhood but in war. Forgive me, it is not my fault."  
                                                  —Iuliia Vladimirovna Drunina

  
  
  
  


"A belt around your neck!" Natalia Alianovna cried. Then she stood in the road glaring at the whirlwind and waited. Perhaps the old story was false, or perhaps it took some time for the demon at the center of it to strangle to death on her words.

As she waited, the raróg's great whirlwind caught the trees along the road and bent their crowns to the forest floor. Its wind grabbed at her long red hair and blew prickling ice and spruce needles into her face. Natalia planted her feet. The great falcon in the center of the whirlwind did as well. 

"Are you going to let me pass?" she shouted. It was cold and she had an important message to deliver. She could allow nothing to prevent her. Nothing.

There was no reply for some time. Then, from its coiled mass of wind, it sang to her in a fine woodwind voice, "I am no demon to frighten old monks, child. Tell me where are you going."

Natalia gripped the strap of her pack where it crossed her heavy fur coat. Flakes of snow spun in the air between them, set a-whirl by the raróg's power. She could think of no reason not to answer with truth, so she did so. "I am going to visit my grandmother." 

The wind at once fell away to nothing. Natalia could see its great body now. The raróg spread its falcon wings wide and took three steps toward her. "I will tell you this truth, orphan girl. Your grandmother died long ago. Long before Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad."

"You can't know—how would you know anything about my grandmother?" she yelled.

The raróg only shook its head. Possibly there was a sheen of sadness in its golden eyes, but with a great surge of wind, it launched itself skyward. A torrent of snow whipped down upon her and the needle-strewn path and the trees, and Natalia Alianovna ran as hard as she could onward.

She ran and she ran, chasing her growing shadow into the east. As the land rose, there grew more snow on the ground and in the trees along the road. Ice crystals stung her face and snow clung to her fur coat, but inside she was warm. She knew that soon she would see her grandmother again. There would be tea and a fire, and she would recount all of her many adventures in the city. The day stretched as she ran, but she wasn't tired and she paid no attention to the wolves howling in the distance. She had a message to deliver. She would see her beloved, wise babushka. Nothing would stop her.

Then, as Natalia crested a hill, she found herself looking straight into the small brown eyes of the largest brown bear she had ever seen. It was larger than a polar bear. It was larger than a Red Army jeep. In the trees above perched several gigantic ravens. They called to one another and flapped their wings in hungry excitement. Drips of snow and ice thumped hard upon the path around her as she skidded to a stop.

"Hello, Misha," said Natalia Alianovna to the gigantic bear. "Why are you awake? Did you forget that it is winter?"

The bear exhaled a deep, sleepy breath. A cloud of foul-smelling steam blew across the space between them and clung to her skin. 

"Are you going to let me pass?" she asked it.

The bear lumbered three paces closer. "You won't find what you're seeking," it told her. Then it sniffed deeply. "You smell like you taste good, orphan girl." 

"Misha, no!" she cried, and dodged the swipe of a huge paw. Two ravens dropped to the ground, shaking their broad wings and closing the sides of the path between the bear and the deep, ancient forest. 

The bear roared and Natalia Alianovna gave a running leap, hitting the hump between the bear's shoulders with her cold hands and springing high into the air. She landed on all fours like a cat. A raven darted at her and she elbowed it in the eye; then she punched its mate, scraping her knuckles on its hard black beak. It cartwheeled away, and she leapt into a sprint that no winter-fogged bear could surpass.

Long after the bear gave up the chase, the whole conspiracy of ravens kept after her, for the joy of a raven, apart from snacking upon the freshly dead, is to remind one how very tenuous life can be. The ravens flew and flew after her, but eventually they also gave up the chase and Natalia knew only the snowy road under her boots, the occasional cooperative farm carved into the land, and the gradually thickening taiga. 

Eventually, she came to a bridge made of new Soviet concrete. It spanned a narrow blue river that ought to have been frozen all the way through at this time of year, but though the banks were solid ice, in midstream the water splashed high and fast, freezing on the surface. Something must be badly wrong for there to be water flowing here at all. She looked to the right and she looked to the left, but there was nothing on the river or its banks. She stepped out onto the bridge. The wind blew cold without the shelter of the forest around her, and then when she reached the midpoint the wind suddenly blew hot. Natalia looked up, gasped, and turned a slow circle with her gaze fixed on the sky. 

Above her, and descending fast, danced the enormous green dragon, Zmey Gorynych, with its three heads and its huge wings the color of spring leaves and red flecks on its legs and tail. It spat a thin line of fire at the river just downstream of the bridge, and Natalia heard a loud crack that seemed somehow to break the air, even though she knew it was but the cry of the injured ice. Slowly she moved forward. Maybe it was too occupied with its game to notice a girl on her own creeping across a lonely country bridge. 

Or perhaps not. She was only a few steps from the bank when the dragon swept down, landing with a thud on the frozen road before her. It completely blocked the path. 

"Are you going to let me pass?" she asked.

"Your message is in vain," it told her. "Tell me, where are you from, Natalia Alianovna?" 

She was surprised to hear her own name in its mouth, but she was careful to keep her face blank. "Stalingrad. And you, Zmey Gorynych?"

The rolling basso voice said, "Ah, I come from the West, as well as the East and South, but not the North. Never the North." It sniffed in dismissal and a coil of smoke rose from its snout. "You will not find the babushka you seek, child. You should instead follow the river to the sea. I will give you snowshoes for your trek, only say that you will go."

"This river?" she asked, because well she knew the maps of the Soviet republics. They had begun her education in geography almost before she could read. "Zmey Gorynych, I know this tributary joins the Volga, and the Volga only passes to the Caspian. What is there for me in Astrakhan? Or did you mean for me to snowshoe to Persia?"

The dragon flapped and snorted. In her mind's eye, Natalia Alianovna could see her grandmother's lined face and canny raised eyebrow. Natalia was expected. Why would she go to Persia?

"You ought to have turned your feet onto the frozen Gulf of Finland and sought shelter in the West, orphan girl." Zmey Gorynych turned one of its three heads and spat a line of fire upstream. Steam hissed and water splashed up over the broken ice. Another head turned and sniffed, alert. "Aha!" cried the third, and Zmey Gorynych leapt into the sky, flying high and fast upstream. A moment later he descended like a hammer on a tremendous Siberian Elk, what in the West they call _moose_ , that had come to investigate the unseasonable thaw.

Despite the urgency of her message, Natalia Alianovna spent a precious moment gazing upon the ice-jam downstream and the frozen white ribbon beyond. In the legends, zmeys spoke their minds freely and, unlike ravens, never bothered with trifling matters.

From this vantage, she saw that the river ice was only broken for the length of a Leningrad city block. Over her shoulder, Zmey Gorynych's three heads were tearing the elk apart, and blood and flesh splashed in a red cascade to the ice below. She only blinked, feeling herself no stranger to blood or gore, although she couldn't guess why she wasn't horrified and disgusted. Nevertheless, the road had sworn to bear her safe to her obligations. She knew one could never place too much faith in water; all the instructions said so. Thus, she fastened her gaze upon the road ahead and ran and did not look back.

The house of Natalia's grandmother used to be a country cottage. It had become a large, square, concrete building of the Stalinist school. Also, it was now located in the midst of a broad field. Under the insulating snow, Natalia knew, lay a vast crop of green winter wheat. There was a path carved through the deep snow, but further away she saw other tracks—those of either dogs or wolves, from this distance she couldn't tell which. At the entry, a giant of a man wrapped all in bear fur stood watching her approach. As she neared, he resolved to be the comrade commissar who watched over her so well while Ivan Petrovich was at war, and he shrank in size so as to pass easily through any ordinary door.

"Natalia Alianovna, welcome!" He kissed her cheeks and bustled her inside, replacing her snowy fur coat and boots with a quilted wool robe and thick fur slippers so warm they must have been waiting by a stove. "This way, child. Your babushka will be delighted to see you," he told her, and over his shoulder he commanded another girl to make fresh tea.

At the end of the hall was a plain gray door, the same as all the other doors Natalia had seen. "She is through here," he said, his hand warm on her shoulder. It was another large room with dark wood doors on three sides. The walls were papered in a deep, blood red. The pattern on the carpet was too dark to discern. In the plush corner chair sat Natalia's beloved babushka, but the room was all wrong.

"Grandmother," she said and kissed her cheeks. "I am so happy to see you again. How are you?"

Her grandmother clasped her with cold hands and smiled up at her with yellowed teeth. "My dear Natuschka, you have returned to us from your long journey. I am very pleased you have arrived safe."

Natalia smiled back, but as she looked around, she noticed that the room seemed somehow wrong. She couldn't help asking, "Wasn't there a window before? And a painting on that wall there?" There was a door there now. It was very confusing and Natalia's head began to hurt as she tried to understand how a door was in the wrong wall and a window in the wrong corner. And was this parlor not bigger than it should be?

Her grandmother glanced at the commissar. "I'll just investigate the tea," he said and slipped out through the door they had entered.

"Never mind about the room, my dear. A woman who frets over nonsense only gets wrinkles before her time, and there are plenty of those to come anyway. Now, sit here by the fire and tell me all about your great excursion."

Natalia took a seat upon a soft upholstered stool and wiggled her thawing toes in the furry slippers. She was so glad to be back. "On the road I met a raróg, a giant bear, and Zmey Gorynych. They were very strange," she began. "And large. The bear wanted to eat me but I ran away. The others only tried to delay me."

"I see. And how was your time in Leningrad?"

"Oh! It was wonderful! Comrade Agrippina Yakovlevna was very gracious, and she chose me to dance the role of the Firebird! It was very challenging, and the audience for the recital was very large, even though we were but the young class. Oh, I can't wait to be old enough to audition for the Bolshoi! Can you imagine, if I could only study under Oksana Bolishinko! That would be magnificent!"

"I understand you are very talented," said the commissar, reentering with a tray. "Now you will drink this up and warm your bones." He handed Natalia a cup already filled and lifted the teapot to top off her grandmother's.

"Why isn't there a samovar?" Natalia asked. "There was before, I thought." She couldn't quite remember, and the harder she tried, the more she had to push away a headache. She sipped her tea instead. It was sweet and thick and not tea at all, despite the fine china cup.

A glance passed above her. The commissar said, "It's in another room, of course. You mustn't worry about these things."

"Oh, but the message!" Natalia Alianovna cried. "Little Uncle says, 'Tell your grandmother there are no workers in China.' But isn't China full of workers, Grandmother?" She knew little about China other than that it had a vast populace full of warring factions, and Japan had invaded Russian and Chinese Manchuria with a puppet tsar who was doing terrible things to the peasants there. Perhaps Little Uncle's message was a secret. Suddenly she felt very warm by the fire. She yawned an enormous yawn. It had been a very, very long journey. Before she knew it, she was asleep.

Once she was asleep, the commissar placed her in a straight-backed chair and poured another cup of something that wasn't tea down her throat. A wide strap held her upright. Grandmother and the commissar had many questions, and even though she slept in the chair, Natalia Alianovna answered them all. Even when the wolves came in through the three doors in the walls with all new questions for her, Natalia Alianovna continued to tell them all they wanted to know. The comrade composer Shostakovich was very genteel and loved Russia very much. The Austrian prince was very talkative, very opinionated, and believed her to be precisely as much older than her years as she'd intended. She told them of the American ambassador, the beautiful lady translator, the too curious taxi driver, the navy officers who taught her the insides of the submarine in Kronshtadt, the important Red Army general who only pretended to be able to read, the women who flocked like pigeons but were really foxes, the latest fads of dear Comrade Stalin, and then she found herself saying to the largest wolf, "The Nazis, including their Baron von Strucker, are en route to Madripoor to attempt an alliance with the demon cult of assassins based there. The word is Japanese for 'hand'."

Growling, the largest wolf seemed to surge and grow even larger. A trail of drool fell from its jaws onto her skin and burned.

Finally the wolves and her grandmother and the commissar, who, she realized, was quite a powerful personage and only play-acting at domestic gentility, all finished their questions.

"She must go to Madripoor," declared the commissar.

"This one?" scoffed the largest wolf. "She is but a child, not a soldier."

Grandmother laughed short and sharp. "When was she ever a child, except in her dreams? Have we not been training her these last six years?"

"She is thirteen now, yes?" asked the second wolf in thoughtful tones. "Your reports indicated she did well on her assignment with Taras Romanov, given the interference of the other assassin."

"Possibly thirteen, yes," answered the commissar with a shrug. "The soldiers who brought her to us gave differing accounts. Some said when they found her she was a squalling infant, others that she was older. Who knows? Those men are now scattered to the war."

"Regardless, she has proven herself capable of complex missions," said the smallest wolf.

The middle wolf paced the room. "An assignment in Madripoor is a far cry from pretty mingling at glamorous parties in Leningrad. We mustn't waste such an asset. Our agents there were slaughtered by the Japanese, you know."

"Let us give her another month of training, then," said the commissar, "We must be sure no one will suspect her."

"Stop being sentimental," snapped Grandmother. "This is war, or have you forgotten."

"No, Professora. I apologize."

"Good," she answered. "Begin tonight. She must be fluent in Japanese and Mandarin. Double her strength training and see that someone instructs her on dyeing her hair. That red is as obvious as a CCCP flag; she only needs a pair of barrettes bearing hammers and sickles. "

"Yes, Professora."

"Another thing," the largest wolf added. "A less distinctive name this time. How she managed to hold onto 'Alianovna' all this time is a mystery. She must be scrubbed clean of any residual Jewish heritage. She must be only Soviet."

"Ah," answered the commissar, "we have tried time and again. She still remembers and clings to the patronym."

"Tonight she saw these walls as they are instead of how she was trained to view them," said Grandmother, scowling.

"That is unacceptable," said the largest wolf. "She will be Natasha Ivanovna. Begin now, Professora Kudrina."

Grandmother nodded her head. "We will immediately increase her chemical conditioning by fifty percent."

"Is there no better formula?" asked the middle wolf.

"There will be once I invent it." Grandmother rose from her chair with a perilous crackling of joints. "Now if you generals are finished for the night, then we will get to work."

"There is one final point, Professora," the largest wolf said. "Comrade Commissar, the war with Germany builds. We must inform you that all psychotechnic work will move to Moscow by the end of the year. The biochemical research will remain here in the Urals." 

"And what, the girls will grow wings to travel between us?" cried Grandmother.

For a long moment, the largest wolf and Grandmother only stared at one another. Finally he replied, "Nevertheless, it shall be so. The order comes from highest levels, and I have no authority to change it even if I wished to." 

After the wolves had gone back through the walls, Natalia Alianovna heard Grandmother say, "It is Pchelintsov. They want him close enough to guard."

"Perhaps they fear the Nazis will steal him from us. I've heard stories about secret experiments."

"Likely so, if the Germans have agents in even half the places that rumors claim," said Grandmother. "Well, there won't be sleep tonight, will there? You see to the girl and I'll see what I can cook up to defeat that elephant's memory she was cursed with."

Some time later, Natalia found herself in an old, familiar dentist's chair with a needle in one arm and wide leather straps buckled across her limbs. She was wearing a nightdress, and her fur slippers had gone. She shivered in the cold air, but she was too groggy to speak. 

"Your name is Natasha Ivanovna," said the man in the white coat. "You have spent a year at the Leningrad State Choreographic School. Your performance as 'The Firebird' was the best any girl your age has ever accomplished. If you work very hard, one day the Bolshoi Ballet may accept you. Confirm your new weapons training, please."

Natasha Ivanovna replied in a slow and steady voice, "Kalashnikov. Luger. Beretta. Walther. All the firearms they had in the armory, in fact, but I must brace the heavy ones on a table or rail. My aim is perfect within the range they allowed me. They did not give me sniper rifle training yet because I am still too small to lift the pack." She paused to think. "Plastic explosives training with Soviet, British, American, and German detonators. Dynamite and fuze. New types of blade work for defense, assassination, combat, and throwing. Those are the new weapons."

The commissar nodded to the man in the white coat. "All is according to the file, Pchelintsov. Very good." Then the commissar turned to Natasha and she saw that he had grown very large again, as he had been when she'd first arrived. "How wonderful to be the Firebird!" he said, and his deep voice rumbled in her bones. "You know, my dear, in some versions of the legend, the tsar does not kill the zhar-ptitsa, nor can the bird ever die. When injured or aged, it merely burns up all at once and rises again from its own ashes."

"It could live a thousand thousand lives," she said wonderingly.

"It could, Natasha. So it could. Maybe you will, too."

"That is an appealing thought, Comrade Commissar. Thank you." She yawned again. "Professor, may I sleep now? It seems as if I ran a thousand miles today. Even two thousand."

"Ah, yes, my dear. You must get your rest. Just allow me..." He brushed back her hair and placed the familiar set of headphones over her ears. She adjusted the band a little, as she always did, and then she heard him say, "Now you are walking into your sleeping chamber and changing into your nightdress. You have cleaned your teeth and you have a water bottle for your feet." His voice had a sing-song cadence that lulled her, just like always, and in a moment she was in a dream of eastern people she could not yet understand, except, oh! _Ni hao, konnichiwa, zdravstvujtye, hello._ Of course! From there proceeded a very long dream of her introducing herself as Natasha Ivanovna Romanova in all the languages she knew, at first in person and then also with pen and paper and finally using a heavy black telephone. And so, she slept and trained and learned of Madripoor, and began to prepare for her next mission.

She was thirteen now, or as good as, and she had danced the leading role in the Firebird. It was only the younger class, of course, but she had been magnificent. In three more years she could audition for the main company. It would be wonderful. She would be the pride of Russia!

It was true the Kalashnikov had bruised her shoulder with its recoil, but her aim was perfect and, anyway, she healed fast. If only she were taller and not such a child still. If only she would grow faster.

"Where are you going?" asked the raróg.

"You won't find what you're seeking," said the bear.

"If only you had turned your feet to the West, child," said Zmey Gorynych.

Zmeys did not bother telling trifles. A dragon who stopped you on the road had something to say you needed to hear, or so the old stories told. But why would a dragon send her away from the home she loved, from her duty to the Party, from her devotion to dear Comrade Stalin, from the ballet?

And yet, with snowshoes, I could walk to the sea, she thought, as she drifted in and out of conversational Japanese and Mandarin. Snowshoes would be more practical than firebird's wings. But when might she see a dragon again? And even if she could, she hadn't turned her feet to the West when she'd had the chance. The option had never occurred to her.

And why would it? The Soviet Union was the best in all things, most especially the ballet. Russia was her mother; that was all that mattered. She would dance. She would follow instructions. She would make Mother Russia proud. _Yī dìng. Hai. Da. Yes._

  
  
  
  



End file.
